stir-fry, books, etc.

[fflo]

My tofu veggie terriyaki stir-fry has never been, if I do say so myself, better.

I have a cookbook coming. It's a cookbook that somebody bought me last year but that never showed up---it was going to be a surprise, so I didn't notice its not arriving. (She said "I thought you would have said something...") So I was ordering this book for the birthday boy of today, and realized I still hadn't gotten the latest Dykes to Watch Out For, so I put that in my cart, too, and then I got to thinking that I oughta have that cookbook. I'm a struggling student cook, still, again, after all these years. Though I was thinking tonight how bloody many onions I must've cut up in my day. I have techniques with onions, even. Yeah, plural techniques.

It's like some kind of holiday, with all this home cooking I've been doing, and my Christmas present from my brother arriving (I'm saving it to open once I've straightened up the living room), and a box from T last week, and two more boxes on the way---a box of books, and a box with a cell phone in it.

I was also thinking, while I was chopping onions and pondering how many onions I've chopped, about how all us onion choppers'll be dead soon enough, and thinking on how my mother probably chopped a lot of onions herself, and thinking on all the dead people who chopped onions, maybe a lot of onions, before they were dead. It's kind of preposterous, all the onion-chopping dead people. Chop lots and lots of onions, but still a finite number of onions, who knows when you'll be chopping your last, and then you're dead, and your onion chopping joins the onion chopping of the dead. It's funny how many of the onions that have been chopped were chopped by now-dead hands, and that the chopping of onions is an activity we animals engage in with our chopping boards on our kitchen counters and our knives and our techniques.

This was not sad thinking about dead onion choppers, I should perhaps point out. Just thinking. Letting it run off leash. Some of it a little anthropologist-on-Mars-y, some of it from the POV of this onionchopper. The mortality may have entered just then partly cuz today's my sister-out-law's birthday, too (as well as Jeffie's), and I talked to her this afternoon, and she's turning 60, and she was talking about being dead soon enough, and worrying about my brother being dead soon, and I've also been thinking about being dead soon enough. (Of course I've been either thinking about that or avoiding thinking about that for as long as I can remember thinking about anything.) And here I am, chopping onions, so mundane, but curiously also in its very mundaneness/mundanity almost the opposite of thinking about being dead. I bet, out of all the onion choppers of all time, I am right up there in onion-chopping thinkers about the chopping of onions, being dead, and being dead having chopped onions.

Comments

[lickingtoad.livejournal.com]

Nothing makes one a better cook other than practice. I, too, have made some unfortunate accidents on my way to learning what I'm alrighty at and what I can't pull off while being posessed by the rambunctious spirit of Escoffier. Keep on ... uh ... cookin'?

PS, I read cookbooks almost every day. Drives my roommates nuts.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

meant to respond here before, and say that i know several people who read cookbooks for fun, as leisure reading, without necessarily using them to cook from. innarrestin'.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

You now, I've done a very little bit of real cooking, and mostly do fake cooking--modifying packaged foods to suit my taste. And chopped onions have never been a part of the real cooking I do, nor a part of the modifications I apply.

So that I have reached the age of 45 without ever chopping an onion. I have never evoked the onion's famous self-defense mecahnism--emitting a toxic substance that irritates your eyes--though I have experienced second-hand eye irritation.

So I may never join the ranks of the dead onion-choppers.

Though I've been thinking about making pasties. I wonder if they have onions. Seems likely. If they do, that would be another motivation find a recipe, so that upon my death, I can pass through the allium gates, and join the ranks of the Dead Onion Choppers.

not sad thinking about proverbial chopping of proverbial onions

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

i am familiar with this notion -- it's a good sign, methinks, in that it shows that dying is one of the things one 'does' along the way, no more and no less than any of the other milestones after which you can't undo what you've done. no more and no less traumatic than being born into a sad family or to stupid parents or in a war-prone country, with twelve fingers and crooked teeth, studying what you love/hate, 'marrying' someone who you always knew you did (not) desire or who did (not) really desire you. can't erase it and you live with it anyway.

chopping onions so that your life on that day would not be without a cooked meal. not that you wouldn't die in the end if you hadn't cooked/eaten it, but at least you tested/tasted one more pleasure/pain to know which it is for you. some people would call it 'discipline' (yogis and circus acrobats and also people who make their beds every day).

so, for example, my grandfather died on tuesday and was buried on wednesday and it hardly registered on my meter as 'death of grandfather' because there is no such value on my meter ('grandfather', that is). on the other hand, there is the 'mother' value, on whose meter this does show and affects my meter in that regard. it turns out he never thought about chopping his onions, and whenever he was asked if he liked it, he would say that garlic was best with cucumbers. now, when you ask 'mother' how her onion chopping has been affected by 'grandfather's onion chopping (or lack thereof) she can say.

apparently, his house was in complete disarray because whoever promised to chop his onions completely neglected to do it for him, and he never knew how or that he was supposed to or that they wouldn't.

can my mother claim he should have known or that his house should not have been in disarray? probably not. do we know if he suffered because his onions were not chopped? not at all. maybe she thought she and he should both live to say what onion chopping was for, but i could see clearly long ago that we would not. so it can't be sad to me as in we-just-didnt-get-to... this is why this is not sad -- there were no secrets held from me. for her i don't know.

some people have the ability to hold you hostage when they refuse to the end to admit that they had to chop onions once. but then you know that they knew no greater sign of love than to delegate x to chop their onions. the question is, can one be held hostage vicariously?

Re: not sad thinking about proverbial chopping of proverbial onions

[fflo.livejournal.com]

It delights me that you have here, above, chopped the onions of talking onion-chopping along with me.

I think there are chains/threads of remote hostaging. Some stronger than others, the threads not necessarily weaker than the chains. I don't know entirely what I mean by that; it's what I thought of saying when I read your last lines.

I really love this part:

maybe she thought she and he should both live to say what onion chopping was for, but i could see clearly long ago that we would not.


I remember clearly after my mother died how I moved into the ability to think in units of a lifetime. Having full ken of the measure for the first time---my notion of it a match for its compass; my grasp big enough to contain its dimension. It is a strange and different world now.

It often seems to me that you've been in this world from a much younger age.

the grasp of chopping

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

i'm not sure whether i've had the grasp of chopping itself for a long time. i think living apart has made a huge difference; or the sense of how far this is for me or for them. i know i've gained a firm grasp of what it means to be able to see them only once a year. if we don't say it then, we might never say it, so i make sure to say it. i'm not sure if i've become like that there or all over -- i generally have lost most of the patience (of the little that i had) for people who don't know when it's time to say it (or who don't hear; or is it listen?). there have certainly been people who i knew died with regrets and that wasn't pretty either.

then there have been those who didn't say it precisely because they knew they should (ie bc they knew very well how to hurt me) -- 'cute yet psycho [things even out]' as my superintelligent, superappropriate fridge magnet puts it for me every day :).

Re: the grasp of chopping

[(Anonymous)]

I wish I had a cool fridge magnet. The only ones I have are those sent to me from some silly nut at Capital One or another corporate godzilla. I must have six magnets from the same place. When will it end? But they do serve a purpose, I suppose. For instance, I sometimes post quotations or just notes to myself (such as "buy milk" or "be nice"). The other day I was surfing around the Web, and I came across this passage:

"Il faut que le monde soit clair. Si les coeurs étaient clairs, le monde serait clair."
("It is necessary that the world be clear. If hearts were clear, the world would be clear.")

I liked it because I had been thinking about the French subjunctive and how and when to use it, and the first sentence does that. But after reading about onion chopping here, I started thinking about the second part of that passage. I can relate to the concepts of onion chopping, tomato chopping, tile cleaning, leaf raking, and many others. I am often able to work out whatever happens to be on my mind through some activity that serves a purpose (I would rather shovel snow than lift weights, walk to the store than ride a stationary bike at the gym), and feel generally at peace about things afterward.

Sometimes, though, I wonder if I should be doing more communicating with others than quietly philosophizing to myself. On the other hand, I don't think it's simply an introverted versus extroverted issue, because I know some people who will talk to everyone they know except the person on their mind, and then they are flabbergasted when they realize that person doesn't know how they feel. I have to confess that I'm not one who is able to pick up on nonverbal communication, and I wish I know how to improve on that.

Re: the grasp of chopping

[3h-du-matin.livejournal.com]

Oops... didn't mean that to be anonymous. Still getting used to things here.

Re: the grasp of chopping

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Well, hello, not-so-anonymous-after-all,-yet-still-mysterious one. And welcome to these parts.

I retain much of the flavor of a substantial life-long hesitation to share my inner philosophizing, though I (like to) think I am overcoming the sheepishness, the fear (in person, not so much here) that spilling out too much of it or putting it in front of (real-world) others for their consideration/response is indulgent, garish, asking too much, somehow potentially legitimately mistaken as condemnatory of that audience, an instant identifier of me as a kook to be avoided, or any of the myriad types of off-putting affront I seem to be have been cursed to postulate it may be to ask, even mildly, for engagement on that level.

Some of it may be about feeling entitled the least to the things I want the most (when I manage to know what I want), or that it is most dangerous to go for them, or that notable desire itself is likely, in my case, pathological---merits a careful check for pathology, anyway, and then another. But at least as much it may go to my doggedly persistent generalist bent toward associating and connecting with a broad swath of folk---many (hell, most) of those I bump into in the circumstances of daily life having little interest in talking of ideas, or not much patience with that sort of thing, or some such. More power to 'em and all, but, boy---I'm glad to've come to some facility at recognizing where it might be welcome, and at taking a chance now and then anyway when there's no such hint, or little. Oh, and at occasionally finding my way to situations in which the rules of behavior of the scene aren't antithetical to mutual out-loud contemplation of a non-utilitarian sort.

Funny thing to tell you, I suppose, stranger. (Stranger?)

Re: the grasp of chopping

[3h-du-matin.livejournal.com]

Well, howdy there, stranger... Sounds as though you have a true talent for striking a balance, knowing when shy away and when to go ahead take a chance, when the potential benefits might justify the risks. Maybe some people may have more of a natural disposition toward acquiring that skill than others?

By the way, to shift focus temporarily (and probably bizarrely abruptly), on the topic of cooking: hats off to you on your stir-fry adventures. I have never had much luck with using tofu in any form, and I honestly admire anyone who does. Maybe I cook it too long or on too high of a temperature, but it just doesn't quite work out for me more often than not (the tofu falls apart, burns up, you name it). But I do like to stir-fry veggies whenever I can, and cooking with a wok is a hoot.

Re: the grasp of chopping

[fflo.livejournal.com]

My tofu technique of late is to fry it in a little peanut oil at a high temperature, stopping before it looks "done"---if you keep frying too long, it's rubber. I've been using cubes and rotating them away from me four flips and then flipping onto each side; really I should probably get out the Fry Mamma Jr. and deep fry real quick, but I hate using up all that oil, and then not being able to re-use it.

Anyway, I do reckon natural proclivities enter into these tendencies about risky connections of odd sorts with folks, but there are also stages and adjustments and emboldenings and retreatings... This to say I don't think it's static, or that we're necessarily stuck with where we are in these matters if we don't want to be.

p.s. re: tofu, Re: the grasp of chopping

[fflo.livejournal.com]

oh, and then i set the tofu aside (drain it on paper towels) while stirring up the veggies, and just toss the tofu in to heat back up at the end

Re: p.s. re: tofu, Re: the grasp of chopping

[3h-du-matin.livejournal.com]

Ok, I'm going to give it the old college try as it were. With the peanut oil, the cubes (more chopping, coolness defined!), the stages of heating, and the paper towels. The whole nine yards. Won't be tonight because I've already eaten. And maybe not tomorrow (probably typical Monday night laziness). But soon! I had almost written tofu off, but I reckon we're going to meet again in a kitchen not so far away...

modes, moods, subjonctif

[(Anonymous)]

i also love the subjunctive in french. english is losing it, i'm afraid, and it's too bad only bc it's easier to read people's investment in their statements when the grammar of their languages mandates that they disclose it (ha! managed to squeeze one in!:)

speaking of these moods, i remember there was the 'optative' mood in greek, similar to subjunctive, but even cooler in that you could use a verb form to signal possibilities and hopes and wishes and visions for the future. can't remember exactly how it works, but i remember it as a miraculously useful item when it was explained to me.

Re: modes, moods, subjonctif

[fflo.livejournal.com]

"subjonctif" -- kewl

does anybody besides latin have deponent verbs? do we?

yer abso co-reckt on the subjunctive wavin' bye-bye. we don't even bother to enforce it at MR much of the time, and several of my coworkers don't even seem to know about it. they use it instinctively in the most obvious/common places/ways, but in longer, more complicated sentences, forget it.

i don't think i was ever taught about it in english, come to think about it.

Re: modes, moods, subjonctif

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

i don't think i was either! i think i figured it out through french -- whenever french *demands it i would 'run' a sentence to see what happened in english. or, i would hear things like 'it is necessary that she stay' and wonder why (until someone enlightened me).

Re: modes, moods, subjonctif

[3h-du-matin.livejournal.com]

Hey now, I'm still trying this one second language down. Don't start me thinking of a third one just yet... don't want to blow a figurative fuse in the attic. Got to be aware of limits. Would be pretty cool to learn about Greek or Latin, though.

Re: modes, moods, subjonctif

[fflo.livejournal.com]

shmizla is almost certainly my most multiply-lingual buddy. me, i speak only one.

Re: modes, moods, subjonctif

[(Anonymous)]

i'm really not that multi-lingual. i only use 2.5 on a daily basis. i've studied many, however, but i've never *lived where i would get a chance to use each of them. and they have all been of the same kind ('indoeuropean' germanic and romance), which is not that exciting in the end.

so i have met the francophone-in-the-making, tofu-and-cool-magnet desiring friend of ours?

french is such a wild language. keep at it if you can.

nonanonymous

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

and obviously that was me :)

Re: nonanonymous

[3h-du-matin.livejournal.com]

so i have met the francophone-in-the-making, tofu-and-cool-magnet desiring friend of ours?

Well, I don't typically blog, aside from reading the occasional one now and then. But it's a possibility, I suppose.

Re: nonanonymous

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

i meant in 'real' life. but even if not, that's cool too. makes me think this place might be good for something (esp when i live in a bucket of a town)

(non)verbal communication

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

for reasons i need not get into right now, i have exchanged several emails today and yesterday with a person who is a professional poker player. 'plays cards' for a living, at casinos, all over the country, where he knows that people are less talented than he is (for obvious reasons). he knows that people in e.g. vegas and california are more talented (and hence the financial stakes are higher -- or maybe the logic is inverse) and he doesn't go there.

when he is more 'talented,' he is not just mathematically better or equal, but also the one 'with no leaks in his life' and better able than the others in that room to assess the situation, people's body language, gambling proclivities. often, i'm told, people can't get up when they should.

in short, this profession requires self-knowledge of the kind that most 'regular' professions never require from their disciples. since hardly any of us grew up wondering whether we should become poker players by profession, it is fascinating to me why only these 'underground' professions recognize that there are knowledges that college won't teach you, but which still affect what you can do? or is it perfectly clear how college trains you to disregard all intuitive knowledge in order to mechanise yourself so that beyond your 'skill set' you would have forget you have anything beyond it, and you wouldn't remember to recognize those forces and those solutions.

btw, i loathe the 'science' of psychology -- its categories, its tables, its rules, its pontificating, its narratives, its power. i hate extroverted and introverted, and i hate sanguine and choleric and i hate 'analysis.'

Re: (non)verbal communication, and, well, the oscars. sorry!

[fflo.livejournal.com]

i'm so curious about the poker player it's hard to say anything about the stuff you're talking about... what leaps to mind about the academy, as i'm sure i've discussed with you before, is the luck factor, and the great unspoken/unspeakable fear---in the face of its arbitrariness, its fashions, and its injustices of mutual backscratching and connections---of not scoring a place, of not finding either an outlet for one's scholarship or a steady job---or, luck of lucks, blessing of blessings, both. i don't know how broadly that packaging of one's schtick goes, but it seems to prevail among the dominant/prominent univ.s, anyway.

george clooney IS sexy. he just accepted an award and joked in a way i like. then said some political stuff. he has the good grace to be humble by joking about not being humble. seemed a tad self-important in a terri gross interview i heard, but what the hell. could just be believing in what he's doing. it's important to him, and he thinks (rightly, i'll grant him) that it can be important to others in serious ways.

sorry for the digression, and the stream of consciousness. i done wore myself out, in a good way, at the building this evening. my brain's a little numb & i need to eat something.

psychology the science, i know little of, though i've read a little in recent years. that whole DSM categorization and official sanctioning of committee-voted disease/syndrome/disorder distinctions is preposterous, of course---and talk about self-important. pontificating --- why isn't that universally off-putting to people? but, as my buddy polly points out, i had to overcome my upbringing to avail myself of therapy, and, though i retain qualms about it of many sorts, i give it credit, along with MR, my buddies, & my own hangin' in, for saving my ass. i don't worship it, but i benefitted from it.

there's an overlap of psychology with anthro & with linguistics that i have a sense i'd still take seriously if i knew more about it.

i use "though" too much. i am often typing it, and often deleting it cuz i've fallen to it again. mebbe i'll practice eschewing it for a while, see what happens.

a guy my ex- ex- and i were both/each kind of involved with once told me that only people who've gone to college use "basically"---think it's true? that's one of my most vivid memories of the dweeb.

the wallace & gromit guys are pleasing dweebs.

lord, why am i rambling like this... somebody give me a soda cracker or something...

oh! here comes dolly parton singing her tranny song. i love dolly. dolly shall reform my weirdness with regard to the tranny-sullying tranny. (or is "trannie" preferred?) i love her outfit. somebody needs to give HER a soda cracker. hope she wins.

have you heard of the controversy about whether paradise now will be said to be an entry from palestine, as was originally written, or from the "palestinian territories," as powers that be would have it? i'm quite curious, but not hopeful, about which way that one will go.